Considering the source please take with a grain of salt
the claim of the greatest CG film ever....

Quote from AICN:

"Here's the film synopsis from the Norwegian Film Institute (www.nfi.no)

"The same day Odd reveals to Geir that he owes the unpredictable and violent Ivan 40.000 kroner, and that he has implicated Geir, their old buddy Roy Arnie comes to visit, along with their mutual friend Kælle.

Ever since he was a little boy, Roy Arnie has been fascinated by the circus. At the moment he is working as the tour manager for Cirkus Stromowskij. This circus has a long and proud tradition, but is a sad sight today. Their main attraction is Jimmy the Elephant, who has been a part of the circus for twenty years.

Throughout his entire "career" they have supplied him with drugs: uppers so that he would be at his best in the ring, downers to calm him down after the show. This has resulted in Jimmy becoming a drug addict.

And like all drug addicts he is extremely paranoid about the police. When Jimmy escapes from the circus, he gets a militant animal rights group on his tail that will stop at nothing to liberate animals and punish corpse-eaters. The Sami Mafia is also interested in Jimmy. Up on the tundra a gang of drunk, frustrated hunters, have for days been drinking and shooting at anything that moves, without hitting a single moose. But up there Jimmy finally finds his first real friend, Bull Moose, the magnificent king of mountain and plain."

"
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=16757

-R

countZero

01-12-2004, 08:08 AM

http://www.freejimmy.com/wankersTALKING2.mov

mwahaha...

the boys at Pixar must be trembling :p

dagw

01-14-2004, 04:19 PM

Cool 'my' movie is on cgtalk. I worked for animagicnet for several years on both the TV show and the movie. However when I left a year ago the studio was cut back to a skeleton crew and the movie was stuck is limbo with severe money problems. I'm not sure if anything much has been done since.

It's a shame really since the script was great and the movie would have been amazing.

For those who want to see more there is still a page at http://www.slippjimmyfri.no/flash/index.html with renders of models and some playblasts and stuff.

Perhaps I should try to get in touch with the old crew

Andrew W

01-14-2004, 05:36 PM

Hmmm, I worked on that film for over a year and I'm still owed 2 month's salary from when the studio I was working at went bust whilst working on the project. The fact that a lot of the animation and lighting set up/rendering was done at Slave (not the stuff you see in the pre-vis animations) seems to have been ignored. All of us at Slave gave a hell of a lot to that movie and all we got out of it was a gaping hole in our bank-balances. The director's a great guy, and I wish him every success with it but don't hold your breath folks.

Plus I was kind of annoyed when all those pictures appeared on aintitcool from my site. No one even bothered to ask if it was OK to use 'em. They should have got them from the production company. That stuff's over a year old! If they ever intend on finishing it then they should get some new work from whichever studio they've got working on it.

Yours, considerably poorer than he would have been if he hadn't worked on Free Jimmy.

Andrew W

Marina Anthony

01-14-2004, 06:17 PM

I worked for a mere five months on Free Jimmy, and only got paid for two of those.

Despite this, I just want to see it finished. A great deal of talent went into that movie, from both London and Norway. It was frankly an honour to be involved in a project with so many fine artists.

I'd hate to see a watered down, hacked about version out there, misrepresenting both the artists and the vision Christopher has for the film.

toonwookie

01-15-2004, 02:43 PM

I too worked on this project for a year and I too was unpaid, the images on the free jimmy web site were not the images produced by slave studios, these may never be seen ( and there was about thirty minutes of footage produced by slave ) which is a great shame, as I lot of talented artists worked very hard under difficult circumstances to produce some good footage. Pixar may not be worried, but pixar to tend to have 100 times the budget free jimmy had, and most of free jimmy's budget as far as we were concerned was imaginary!!
The Producer is still trying to find a studio to complete this project, after failed attempts to complete this movie in India ( apparently something to do with one party being economic with the truth about money and the other side being economic with the truth about equipment, staff and experitise, could happen to anyone! )

It is ironic that the production of a film, exploring the dark side of norweign culture, should itself explore a very dark side of the CG animation industry. If only we had filmed a documentary of the production, it has all the making's of a very black comedy, though I have no idea what the final scene will be. Personally I am hoping for a hollywood, happy ending, the good guys get paid, the bad guys get dissolved by a bucket of water sceaming " I'm melting !"

It is a million to one shot but ... ;)

Andrew W

01-16-2004, 03:53 PM

Originally posted by Marina Anthony
I'd hate to see a watered down, hacked about version out there, misrepresenting both the artists and the vision Christopher has for the film.

Totally agree on this. I can't help feeling that if you have so many studios working on the same stuff (not a sequence per company as in VFX work) then the chances of a seamless balanced film coming out at the end of the day is minimal.

Some of the stuff was looking really nice too, such a shame.

A

CaptainSam

01-18-2004, 05:12 PM

http://www.freejimmy.com/wankersTALKING2.mov

mwahaha...

the boys at Pixar must be trembling

That clip is a 3 years old playblast from the pilot; I dont think that scene is even in the final movie. The final rendered stuff that Slave produced looks a helluva lot better.

The freejimmy.com page is down. Like Dag said, use
http://www.slippjimmyfri.no/flash/index.html and then click on the US flag in the upper right corner to get the English language version of the page. You can see some rendered stills (all done at Slave) at http://www.slippjimmyfri.no/flash/rendergalleri.php?lang=eng

Yeah, I worked on the movie too.

Mauritius

01-18-2004, 05:20 PM

I was hired by the Indian company (http://www.colorchipsindia.com/) as Lighting & Rendering supervisor. They had and have neither the people or skills nor the equipment required to finish this show.
After finding that out the hard way in India myself and not seeing money for three weeks and a lot of other ridiculous things happening which are beyond this thread, I bailed out. Suffice to say that I haven't seen a penny ever.

I do believe, that toonwookie's summary of what led to the second approach of finishing the movie failing again pretty much is true.

Being in Oslo now for probably obvious reasons I can second that the director, Christopher Nielsen, is indeed a gentleman. I've been hanging out with him and the crazy Norwegian crew several times last week.
:beer:

I think I can also say--w/o stretching my NDA too much--that there is a good chance to see this movie finished.

Cheers,

Moritz

MortenM

01-19-2004, 08:08 AM

Since so may past and present Jimmy crew members are already on here I thought I should share my thoughts as well. To Andrew and all the other at ex-Slave: You all did a absolutely wonderful job on Jimmy. The 20 minutes rendered material looks great. We all here at AnimagicNet felt it was a shame what happened to you.

My oppinion is that one or more persons made some really bad decisions in London about a year ago. If the right decisions had been made, it would have been better for all of us, amd the movie would have been finished now.

Let's hope that Moritz is right in his predictions!

--Morten

toonwookie

01-19-2004, 05:13 PM

Morten, you are definitely one of the "good guys" in my opinion and I would like to, third the motion that Christopher is indeed a gentleman. I think all the artists involved should be proud of what they acheived on this project. :beer:
Good luck to all of you

JimmyTheSaint

01-19-2004, 11:05 PM

yeah i wen't down to the studio about a year ago (maybe a bit longer) and production was going fine. not sure what happend since then. but the stills and anims going on were great....

MortenM

08-24-2005, 09:30 AM

As so many of the "Free Jimmy" crew lurks around here, I thought I would present an up-to-date news flash on this project. As of now (mid August 2005), here is the status:

- The film is not dead!
- The film and studio (formerly known as AnimagicNet, now known as Storm Studio) was bought by a Lars Hellebust in January. He is now the film's producer. To all the old Slave hands out there, this means that Hawk, the old producer, is no longer part of the film.
- The whole thing has been re-edited! This is rather uncommon for animation production, but still. It has generated more work as new shots are in, and old shots are re-framed, extended or otherwise changed. We do think that the new edit will generate a better film!
- The web site is up again: http://www.freejimmy.com/. At the moment, it's Norwegian only, but English is in the works.
- The film is currently lit and rendered in Canada while re-edtiting, re-animation, set re-dressing, compositing etc. etc. is going on here in Norway.
- Norwegian release is set to March 2006. International release (including the English voices of Woody Harrelson, Jim Broadbent etc.) will be after that.

All in all it really looks like this 5 year old project that so many of us have worked on finally will be finished. (Hoping that this quote will not end up on the list of Famous Last Words).

--Morten

jeremybirn

08-24-2005, 01:48 PM

Plus I was kind of annoyed when all those pictures appeared on aintitcool from my site. No one even bothered to ask if it was OK to use 'em. They should have got them from the production company. That stuff's over a year old! If they ever intend on finishing it then they should get some new work from whichever studio they've got working on it.

They are linking to images on your site. If you just rename that directory and put a 404 page that bounces people to your homepage, they can all see the images in context instead of aicn just running up your bandwidth bills.

-jeremy

Mauritius

08-25-2005, 03:33 AM

Awesome!
Thumbs up to the crew at Animagic & Modelink. The new lighting looks kick ass.
I'm so happy this movie gets finished. I guess Christopher must be a very happy man these days.
Great work and congrats to everyone!
I shall definitely try to be in Oslo for the premiere. :beer:

Cheers,

Moritz

Madhat

11-17-2005, 06:23 PM

Interesting thread to say the least.

As a lead lighter for the Canadian crew (Modelink), I can honestly say that it's been one of the most difficult projects I have worked on. It started off on the wrong foot, and hobbled it's way through the first 3 months. We also had big money troubles, and went one month without pay in the beginning but most of us now are only down 2 weeks.

The new producer of the film seems to have his act together and I can see the finish line in near distance. We've completed our original contract's worth of shots, 1075 I think, and they have decided they wanted to redo a lot of the Slave work. (sorry to whoever this effects) Our deadline to finish the Slave stuff and remaining new shots that they've added is end of January, and apparently they want to release for March 2006.

looking forward to the end.

stepington

02-13-2006, 04:51 PM

the trailer - as found on cartoon brew
(http://www.cartoonbrew.com/)
trailer is here (http://media.filmweb.no/trailere/ect/ECT20030083/eswicqe16.mov)

As of the date of this post, we are down to the last few shots to light, and then there will be some fixing to do. Seems like a couple more weeks for the few of us left lighting here in Montreal.

We are very impressed with the final look. We've always thought that our lighting was very good, but the compers over in Oslo have done a top notch job because the images look really good. Congrats to everyone over there.

I can see the light!

Joe Hughes

02-15-2006, 11:41 PM

i wanna see it just for the PORN!!! (fifth still, second poster on the right). what good animated feature doesnt have a female lying down spreading her V*g*na wide open.

Youal

02-19-2006, 08:41 PM

sorry, double post....delete this.

Youal

02-19-2006, 09:58 PM

Teaser link:
http://www.filmweb.no/trailere/article93766.ece

Clip:
There is some profanity in it....

http://www.nattguiden.no/media/200602/suuccly24.mov

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